


Edges

by DracoMaleficium



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: (Jesus Christ Self What the Fuck), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Earth-3, Infidelity, Jealousy, Love Triangles, M/M, Oneshot, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6657160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoMaleficium/pseuds/DracoMaleficium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bruce meets Jokester for the first time, it feels like the universe has given him everything he didn't want to admit he needed.</p><p>Except it's never that simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Edges

**Author's Note:**

> Okay wow, so this ficlet alone breaks like 3 of my cardinal Do Nots of writing: love triangles, infidelity and 2nd person POV. I don't know what this fandom is doing to me but it's scary and I need help.
> 
> Anyway, the idea is a result of long skype conversations with Mitzvah (thank you!) about how Jokester and Owlman are, in theory, what Batman and Joker would possibly want the other to be, and how it could backfire on them in a "careful what you wish for" way. In that way it's less a proper story and more of a freeform character and ship study, so don't expect a lot of coherence here. If you're squicked by infidelity like I am, I hope the twist at the end will make it all better.
> 
> Takes place in a weird unspecified "what if" universe in which Jokester doesn't get immediately killed after jumping dimensions. 
> 
> Enjoy and please let me know what you think!

When he first appears, it is in a shower of sparks and laughter and color, and you are _captivated_.

He moves with the same easy grace that makes you think of a panther in the grass, gearing to leap. His voice is the same throaty cadence of near-nonsensical singsong. His lips are the same ruby-red, and they curl into smiles which are just as wide, just as pointed, just as scathing. He has the same chalk-white skin. The same long, long legs. Slim hips hugged by high-quality, garish velvet. Hair carefully styled over his brow.

And yet he’s green where he should be purple, and purple where he should be green. There is a smiley face pin in the lapel where you expect a flower boutonniere. His laughter is easy and free, but not manic. Not cruel. And then there’s the eyes, which are softer, kinder, gentler, the sadness in them so much closer to the surface; and when they gleam it is with the playfulness of genuine humor or the steel of determination, not with the bloodlust of a murderer. Not with cold, relentless insanity.

He jumps into the fight not against you, but with you. And of course you don’t trust him at first, you can’t, but then he laughs, and the laughter is the same but also entirely _different_ , and he manages to down three of Riddler’s henchmen before you make up your mind what to do about him. 

He turns to you. He smiles and says, “Hey there, handsome.”

Just as he knocks out a guy with a clownish boxing glove springing from his belt.

And then there’s nothing for it but to keep on fighting, so you do, with this laughing splash of color by your side for once, and you keep glancing over your shoulder for the cold steel of a knife that never comes. His knives are not for you. His gas is not for you. Nor are his bullets, his boxing gloves, his mallet, his razor-sharp cards. He winks at you once or twice, and grins, the grin the same and yet entirely wrong, but he never attacks you, and soon the fight is over and you’re left standing there and watching and trying to wrap your head around the existence of something that doesn’t have a right to exist.

He feels your eyes on him. He comes up to you with that balance-shattering smile, the one that’s both painfully familiar and yet not at all.

“I’m Jokester,” he says. “I hear my counterpart here has been giving you a hard time, but if it’s any consolation yours is a pain in the ass too, so in my book, we’re even. Shake on it?”

He holds up his hand to you.

You look into his eyes again, and see nothing but gentle sadness reflected back at you. Curiosity, too, and the spark of excitement that has yet to flicker out after the fight. There’s not a sign of madness anywhere in there. Not a trace of evil. 

Slowly, though every instinct you’ve developed over the years bursts to protest, you reach out and shake his hand.

There is no joy buzzer. The grip is firm and steady, and lingers only two seconds longer than it should, a fleeting brush of glove on glove. 

You wish you could ask him to remove the glove. Just to see if you could feel blood marring the whiteness of his hands. 

He winks at you and says, “We should do this again sometime.”

You let him go, because you can’t think of a way to stop him that wouldn’t compromise the tenuous grip you thought you had on the part of yourself you’d rather keep buried. 

Still, when he disappears, you wish you had the words to make him stay. Because you can’t help but think that this, this impossible, unthinkable thing, this _clown who doesn’t kill_ , has been sent here to this particular Earth…

…just for you. 

 

***

 

You fight by his side again a week later, and he leaves you just as unsettled, just as confused, just as _yearning_. You can’t shake it. The impression that his presence here is a gift, a gift for you, is too strong, and coasts on your blood with the persistence of disease — not as strong as that _other_ disease that clings to you in the cold rainy nights, but there, and you cannot possibly deny before yourself that one is a result of the other.

This time, he lingers after the fight. He looks at you. 

“You wouldn’t happen to have some cash on you, would you?” he asks, his smile sheepish, his eyes bright. “I’m starving.”

You almost want to smile. You know you shouldn’t, but you say, “I know a place.”

You end up sitting on a rooftop next to him, a McDonald’s bag between you, stealing glances at him as he eats. 

Your heart hurts. Your head pulses with tension. 

A clown who doesn’t kill, who is _good_ , who is so similar and yet so different, and your stomach flips and pinches because you remember just how many times you’ve wondered if this could ever be possible. 

How many times you _wished_ it could, and then stopped, because you knew that _he_ could never actually be what you want or need him to be. 

That he would never become someone you could allow yourself to love.

And yet… 

He catches you staring.

“Look, I know, okay?” he says, grabbing a napkin and dabbing it at his smiling mouth. “It’s impossible to eat these things without getting this shit all over your face. I’d like you see you try, O Silent One.”

“It’s not that.” You shake your head and look away just as the ache in your stomach gets worse. 

He’s silent for a moment. 

“I’ve met him, you know,” he says.

You fix your eyes on the police patrol car below. “Met who?”

“Other me. We had a bit of a run-in two days ago, turns out he was curious about me. I’m not ashamed to say that I barely made it out alive. He’s… something, isn’t he?”

You don’t have it in you to respond. 

Instead you let him finish his meal in silence, and then you ask, “Do you have anywhere to go?”

He laughs softly. His feet dangle over the ledge, careless, disregarding the 20-storey drop. “I’m squatting in this one place near Central,” he confesses. “I’d take you there but you strike me as the kind of guy who prefers to sleep in an actual bed.”

His smile is goading but soft. Wind catches in his hair. Your heart aches, and you make a decision.

You take him home.

 

***

 

For the first week, nothing happens. He gets one of the guest bedrooms, tries to make friends with Alfred and brings Bruce coffee in his study, perching on the edge of the desk. You eat dinner together each night, and his chatter, not to mention his colors, clash horribly with the stately decor and yet seem to make the dining room so much brighter. He brings in flowers from the gardens and decorates your bedroom. He helps Alfred clean and cook. He plays board games with Tim and laughs when he loses. You watch him sprawled on the floor by the fireplace, light from the fire licking his hair, and the sting in your heart gets so bad you have to get up and leave.

You ask what he does with his days. He explains he’s trying to find someone named Duela, and when you ask, he gives you his life story without hesitation, talking in light tones about pain and heartbreak and torture and loss. He misses his wife and even more than that he misses his daughter, and suddenly the sadness in his eyes colors with meaning you recognize all too well. 

You don’t tell him about Jason, but you wish you could. He already feels much closer anyway, and you have a feeling he senses that too.

His smile gets warmer. His hand reaches across the table to touch yours.

He’s not wearing his gloves, and there is no blood on his hands.

 

***

 

Things come to a head the night you have to face _him_ again, green hair wild and curling on the wind, eyes wild and betrayed, his red mouth twisted in something terrible that you recognize and wish you didn’t.

You’re both sloppy, that night. Too slow. Too distracted. You, because you keep looking at him and comparing, and hurting in a way you wish would just _stop_ , and him, because… 

Because he thinks you’ve replaced him. Because he’s terrified that you won’t need him anymore. You see it in his eyes, in the desperate slashes of his hand, and are disgusted enough with yourself for reading him so clearly that you slip and let him stab you in the side. 

He escapes into the night, into the rain, alone. You drag yourself to the car, tired, worn out, bleeding. 

Angry. 

And still, _still_ aching, more than ever, the ache pooling around you like the blood dripping through the gash in the suit until it seems to fill up the car. 

It’s Alfred who sees to the wound, as usual, but it’s the white, white hand of the Jokester and the glint of moonlight in purple hair that you see beside you in the bed.

In the dark it almost looks green. Your heart aches and _throbs_ , and you let your own hand reach out.

He smiles. He answers the plea that is never voiced and leans down to gently touch his lips to yours. 

And you move to cup the back of his head and keep him there when he wants to pull away, and you deepen the kiss, and you pull him closer. His hair smells like your own shampoo. He laughs, breathing your air, touching the dip in your collarbone. 

“Finally,” he whispers, leaning his forehead against yours. “I was beginning to fear you’d never loosen up enough for this.”

His laugh slices through the wound in your side, pulsing in red-hot waves of hurt. 

You keep him close and kiss him again, thinking of green and then of purple, thinking of eyes gleaming with betrayal, of your own anger, of the long, long nights you spent denying yourself for fear of loving a monster.

The person in your arms now is not a monster. It’s someone you _could_ love. Someone who is softer, gentler, warmer, someone whose edges are all different and worn. 

He stays with you that night, and you allow yourself to hope.

 

***

 

The first time he wakes you up with a kiss and a laugh, your heart nearly flies out of your chest before you remember, and then all air leaves you in an unspoken, “Oh.” 

You get better, in time. You get used to hearing this laugh close to your ear and not thinking about how different it sounds from what you’re used to. You learn to answer his smiles and lean in for his kisses, and you learn to make love to him at night threading your hands through his hair without closing your eyes and wishing it was green.

You learn to let go, and lose yourself in what you have instead of what you never will. 

Most of the time. 

For a while.

And when you do, it’s good, and you lie in bed with his head pillowed on your chest, and you gaze out the window and almost, almost don’t feel guilty.

He is everything you wanted. Everything you wished for, whenever you allowed yourself to wish at all. 

You kiss his hair, breathe in the smell of your own shampoo, and close your eyes.

 

***

 

You hoped it would last. You aren’t surprised when you finally realize it won’t.

Not surprised, but still disgusted, and when you first start missing the edges you know aren’t there, you manage to keep the longing buried deep enough that when you kiss him, you can almost forget.

But the longings get worse. And the ache comes back, so much sharper than before.

You listen to the news, you notice that none of the reports are about _him_ , and you touch the scar in your side without even knowing.

“It’s like he’s disappeared completely,” Dick tells you over the comm one night, after you can’t bear it any longer and have to ask. “The only thing we know for sure is he’s not at Arkham. Sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe he’s jealous you found yourself a new pet clown,” Dick suggests, lightness in his voice.

You end the connection before he can read something in yours you don’t want him to read.

At first, you try to let it go. If _he_ isn’t out there making trouble, that’s _good_. Or so they tell you, and you want to make yourself believe that.

But soon, the ache in your heart gets too strong to ignore, and you start spending your nights chasing rumors and shadows and hearsay, combing through abandoned warehouses and demolition sites and even the sewers.

“He may be planning something big,” you explain into purple hair, quietly, between kisses which have become too gentle to satisfy you. 

“He may,” Jokester agrees easily enough. 

“You don’t think I’m being paranoid?”

“I’m the hero on my Earth, remember?” He bites on your lower lip and tugs lightly before releasing it with a grin, ever playful, ever bright. “Whenever old Owlsie was too quiet I’d get antsy too. It usually meant something big would go boom eventually. You should definitely get on that.”

He strokes you to hardness as he says it, though, teasing you, playing with you, and you let him, but you do end up closing your eyes. 

It feels good. 

But not good enough to dull the ache.

 

***

 

It gets worse as time passes and your nightly hunts fail to produce a single clue. 

You remember the look in those wild green eyes. You remember the desperation and the anger and the betrayal. He couldn’t know, he had no way of knowing, but in your heart you feel that he does, that he _did_ , and that makes you worry, and the worry in turn makes you sick.

His henchmen know nothing. Street level know nothing. The upper tiers know nothing, and sneer at you like the very fact that you’d think they know is an insult. There’s not a rumor you can latch onto, not even a whisper, not even a murmur, only the fear left in his wake trailing through Gotham like the shudders when his name is spoken out loud.

You try to seek comfort and distraction in the pair of white arms still waiting for you back home, but the edges are not there, and the scar in your side throbs with pain, and the kisses are getting much too sweet. 

You don’t want to accept the truth. You wish you could just — settle, to just forget and let go and move on. But night after night, day after day, it is becoming clearer: you can’t. You thought you had what you wanted but this is not what you _need_ , and your attempts to not miss the bite and the sneer and the madness, the thrill of the struggle, the _familiarity_ of your dance, are petering out into nothing. 

You think Jokester is beginning to notice. You think everyone is.

Still you can’t help it, and it’s like there’s a thick black mass in your gut, swirling, cloying, clogging your windpipe, rising up in a sour bile and climbing up to your throat to choke you with everything you will not say.

Until you find a note taped to the windshield of your car that says,

 

_Check the fallout shelter in the sewers under Sullivan street. Don’t say it was me._

_— HQ_

 

And you don’t even remember how you got here, but the next thing you know is you’re wading through dirty canals and cling to stinking damp walls as the stench of waste curls in the air around you.

It’s dark in here. Cold. Water trickles in booming echoes down endless tunnels of black. But then there’s a glimmer of light in one of the forks, and you turn, and see torches blazing outside a small wooden door with a KEEP OUT sprayed across it in angry red.

You swallow. You stare at the door for a full five minutes before you take a single step, and when you do, your heart stutters up into your mouth, beating like it usually does when you know there’s a fight waiting around the corner. 

You push the door open, ready for anything.

Except the sight of the Joker curled up on a dirty mattress, under a single rough, patched-up blanket, surrounded by boxes, emptied cans and old, moth-eaten furniture. 

He stares at you, bleary-eyed, like he’s just woken up, his hair a mess, stubble dusted over his chin. Looking thin. Looking small. 

He says, “Get out.”

You take a step into the room. It stinks of old sweat and unwashed clothes, of rot and moisture, and you wonder if he’s been living here in the sewers like a rat all this time. “No,” you say.

“I’m tired,” he says. He lies back down on the mattress. “Go back to your new dance partner,” he spits out, quiet and hoarse.

And the ache flares up because you were _right_ , and you hate being right about this, but also the black swirling mass in your gut lets up a bit and your head is rushing with noise and resolve and cold sweat breaks out on your skin, and you keep walking towards him until your knees hit the damp floor right beside the mattress.

You don’t _want_ to do any of this. You want to get out of here and leave him behind, and with him, the ache, the longing, the guilt. You wish you could just shut it all away here, in this dark shelter underground, and never think of it again. You wish you could go back to the light and the gentleness and the laughter without cruelty, and be content with it. 

But he’s here now and the sight of him chokes you up, and the want flares up in you in ways it never had before, and you reach out for him before the cold rationalizations can stop you.

You can’t go back now. You can’t. You know what you need, maybe for the first time in a long, long while, and in this rushing clarity you _know_ that it’s the edges you can’t do without after all.

His edges. His blades. Him.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. 

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

He’s silent for what feels like an age before you feel his cold finger touching your lips.

“I wish I could just.” His voice falters, he’s looking away. His other hand curls around a gun. “I wish I could just blow your brains out. Be done with it. With you.”

Your throat is blocked. You wait, but he doesn’t make a move.

So eventually, it’s on you.

He flinches when you move closer, and draws away when you climb onto the mattress. He’s hurt and angry and reminds you of a stray dog who’s been kicked once too often. 

You capture his hand in yours and press it against your mouth, and close your eyes, and breathe out.

That’s it. It’s over. The deed is done and the want is out there, thick and cloying between you. You can hear the gates shutting behind you and can smell the bridges burning, and you know with absolute finality that there is no turning back from this.

You have kissed his hand, and now you both know, and neither of you can hide anymore. 

He keens quietly, a small, tortured sound. He’s uncoiling, opening up to you almost grudgingly. You pull him close, and he bites on your bottom lip so hard your first kiss tastes of blood.

And then you tangle in the darkness, pulling and pushing and clawing and biting, and he is all edges and fury and no softness whatsoever, and his laughter pulses with madness, and you kiss and kiss and kiss him, taste the sweat and the blood and the old scars on his cold skin, and your head is swimming because _this is it_ , this is what you wanted all along, and it’s _his_ edges you’ve fallen in love with.

There can be no going back from this. You can no longer live on substitutes. You wonder what’s wrong with you, and how you can ever face your own life now, and in the darkness of this stinking room it doesn’t seem to matter at all.

 

***

 

Eventually, though, you have to come home. 

And you have to face what’s happened, and what you’ve done. And up here, away from the glint of madness, it does matter. 

You come in, knock on the door to the Jokester’s bedroom. Your confession is already prepared. Your apology lined up. You’re ready to own up to everything, and to grovel, and to carry the consequences on your back like you always had…

… Except the bedroom is empty. Except there’s a note on the tidy bed.

You pick it up with a pounding heart, and nearly choke on a sound that’s caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

 

_Thanks for showing a guy a good time, baby, it was a blast, but I really do have to be moving on now. It’s not you, it’s me. Ha! Because of the other me, get it? Oh, this is just too good. Confusing, I know, but I trust you two can work it out between you. I only wish Owlsie and I had that kind of chance, but what can I say, owls don't really do it for me._

_Take care of your clown, big guy, and wish me luck. I’m off to look for my little girl_. 

_Toodles!_

_— J._

 

You fold the note carefully and carry it down to the cave. You don’t really need the reminders, but it’s good to have it on hand anyway, whenever you need to see it. 

You only hope one day you can return the favor.


End file.
